6 elephants lost: A tragedy equivalent to one million human deaths

Yesterday, the environment suffered a devastating blow.  Not the kind that makes headlines with images of burning mansions (of your favourite Hollywood stars) or collapsing ice shelves (at your future holiday destination).  This was a quieter tragedy, but no less profound.  Wildfires didn't consume vast tracts of land. No record-breaking glacial melt or dramatic surge of the sea.  Yet, something essential was lost, something that echoes far beyond the immediate scene.

Six Asian elephants of a family were brutally killed on Thursday as they were run over by a train in Sri Lanka. It happened in Habarana, east of the capital Colombo, when a Batticaloa- Colombo train crashed into the herd trying to cross the railway tracks near the Kaduwalla National Park at Gal Oya, Five of them died on the spot and one succumbed to injuries later. There is only one left in the herd and when officials arrived at the scene, they saw the animal holding the trunk of the injured family member.

Such accidents are not so uncommon in Sri Lanka and it is only 6 elephants, so why make a big deal of it, you might ask. There is no need to look at it from the animal’s perspective and feel bad about it, you might say. Look at it from a human standpoint. No one was dead or injured in the incident - the common refrains.

Okay, let us look at look at it from the human perspective and use purely human logic. No sentiments involved. Let’s talk numbers instead.

Asiatic elephants are one of the three elephant species on earth and their number is estimated to be somewhere between, 40,000 and 50,000. Let us take it as 50,000. So what is 6 elephants to 50,000? It is 0.012 per cent of their total population. It is simple math. So tiny, right? No cause for alarm!

Now take the case of humans. The total human population as per the World Population Clock website is 8.2 billion.  Now, what is 0.012 per cent of the total human population of 8.2 billion? That would be around 984,000. Almost one million. You don’t need to feel sympathy for the last elephant of the family left alive in the incident, but in some way, in absolute terms, the death of 6 elephants, to their species, is equal to the death of roughly one million human beings.

Imagine a disaster so immense it claims a million human lives.  That is the proportional equivalent of what happened to the elephants.  We have witnessed such tragedies. The 1937 Yangtze River flood, as documented by Britannica and others, is estimated to have killed 3.7 million.  The 2010 Haitian earthquake, a more recent horror, took between 200,000 and 300,000 lives.  Yet, the loss of these six elephants represents a blow to their species that dwarfs even these human catastrophes.  Are we finally ready to acknowledge the devastating consequences of our actions on the animal kingdom?